"A classicism […] as hard […] as a child's mind": la fortuna di de Chirico in Inghilterra, ca. 1928-33

By analysing Giorgio de Chirico’s two solo exhibitions at the Arthur Tooth & Sons Gallery in London in October-November 1928 and in April-May 1931, this essay aims to reconstruct various episodes of the critical and visual reception of De Chirico’s art in Britain before the Surrealist movement definitively took root in the years after 1936. In studying the case of de Chirico, a network of contacts, exchanges and of circulating artworks and artists between England and the European continent emerges, in which we find key figures such as art dealer Léonce Rosenberg, patron of the arts Osbert Sitwell, artists Edward Wadsworth, Paul Nash, John Armstrong and Tristram Hillier, all of whom facilitated the development of a transnational artistic language in the climate of the so-called “return to order”.